


Composite Windows

by athelas



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Foggy Nelson, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27511285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athelas/pseuds/athelas
Summary: This is something Foggy hasn’t seen before. Matt’s body may be intact, but something much deeper has cleaved apart. The way an apartment can be clean, the furniture in place, and still be a wasteland.A response to Light Perception by luthienne.
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	Composite Windows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luthienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthienne/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Light Perception](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18214658) by [luthienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthienne/pseuds/luthienne). 



_"What is that noise?"  
The wind under the door.  
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"  
Nothing again nothing.  
"Do  
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember  
"Nothing?"_

_I remember  
Those are pearls that were his eyes._

\- T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Another unanswered phone call.

Every ring draws Foggy deeper into the panic he’s so accustomed to. By the time he hears the bullshit robot, “this voice mailbox is full”, he’s already tamping down the feeling. He shuts a door built from futility, from not knowing what to do. He isn’t Matt. He can’t see without eyes, can’t hear the details of a heartbeat. Sometimes Foggy feels, in those futile conversations, like all he’s doing is hurling out Matt’s traumas in an attempt to understand. He hurls them like tennis balls against a wall: Matt’s childhood, Matt’s losses. But it’s only ever the darkness Foggy can name. And he knows that he isn’t doing any of it right.

Maybe it’s the impossible standard of their first year as friends. Foggy instantly knew what it felt like to really understand Matt, the chemistry of their connection. When they walked the same wavelength, and parts of themselves rose to the surface, so clearly stitched from the same fabric. It’s been so long since Foggy has felt that— since he’s known how to.

Now here he is, standing in front of a familiar door looms like some portal into a shadow dimension. Because he doesn’t know the shock that could live on the other side. He has seen the person he loves as an unmoving weight on the ground, the person he loves as _body_ , the person gone, the body broken. Foggy has felt his own body slide out from under him, his vision turned to ash. Foggy doesn’t want to open the door to find that dark world, where he might be blinded by terror and loss.

But he’s Foggy. None of this is his job. He’s supposed to make Matt laugh, to speak and tread lightly, to be the one who makes things easier. He’s supposed to lift the weight, not contribute to it, and so there is no room here for his fear or his own loss. Only the tinny echo of the apartment stairs. Only the sounds of traffic, stalling and rushing outside. Foggy’s keys hover in front of the lock. Does he hear crying on the other side of the door? Gasps, wind? Or is it only his imagination filling in the gaps?

He knocks. A stupid, polite thing. What does he expect, that Matt will gingerly open the door, that he’ll have a mug of tea and this morning’s paper and a clean sweater on?

“Matt?” Foggy says to the door. “Hey, buddy, it’s me. I just called. You home?”

He might actually be hearing it now: the shift of a body on the ground. Intake of breath. Foggy presses his ear to the door, and then he’s shoving the key into the lock. He starts to narrate, as he does when anxious:

“I’m taking out my key—well, my key was already out, but key is now turning,” he says. Then, when all sound seems to have gone dead: “Ok, honestly, I never really know if silence in this apartment means ‘go away, I’m busy’, or if it means ‘I’m bleeding out on the floor’, so, I’m coming in, Matt.”

The apartment. Foggy’s eyes are always drawn first to the composite windows, the way they cool and distort light, or maybe he doesn’t want to look at the stairs yet, maybe he can’t let his eyes go there because they might stay there the rest of his life.

He pans the wreckage instead: a shattered cell phone in beetle-like shards on the ground, just under the wall. That goddamn mask, a bloodred face staring up from the ground. The rest of the place seems untouched but Foggy knows it to be wreckage.

Then the details: the shape of Matt, a crouched, coiled, heaped thing. Matt’s head sways as if too heavy, as if he can’t lift it or himself. A matted line of blood bisects Matt’s neck, the first wound that Foggy notices.

“Hey, Foggy.”

At least that’s what Foggy thinks he hears. He can hardly make Matt’s breathy voice, even now that he’s at Matt’s side, unsure of when he started moving.

“Fog—”

“Matt,” says Foggy. “I’m here. Are you ok?”

How many times has he asked that inane question? How many times has he said something meaningless in an effort to say anything at all? How must it make Matt feel, to never hear the words he needs, the words Foggy hasn’t figured out yet?

Matt says nothing. Of course. Nothing to say. The body is doing the talking. Foggy kneels but feels his hands knotting together at his chest, afraid to touch. “Matt?”

There’s some space, just a few seconds, in which Matt’s mouth opens and hovers. Foggy can see his friend’s jaw clenching, the sheer effort of this silence.

In that span of seconds, Foggy remembers Matt in the courtroom. Matt’s words like a waterpark, waters constantly flowing and winding but expertly controlled. Matt guiding an argument as if he were leading someone to safety. And he always was—leading someone to safety. Foggy remembers when his best friend had all the words in the world, when there was a place inside of Matt that remained whole. Matt could draw words from that safehouse; it was a source that allowed him to give. Now there is no source. Only silence.

Foggy thinks of an old phrase, one that probably populates books on Matt’s shelves but not on his: _yearn toward._ He knows what that means now. He can feel his heart, his being, pulling toward Matt, wanting something desperate and unnamable even as his body remains paralyzed.

The silence breaks with a sob. Foggy expects Matt to tumble into him, and he feels ready for this, wants to accept those trembling shoulders. But Matt keeps himself away. Foggy notices Matt’s hands, clawing into the wood floor, shaking with each sob. Knuckles wet and dark.

Foggy realizes, though, that Matt can move. He can crouch and sob. His bones aren’t shattered, his ligaments aren’t torn, his skull isn’t cracked open. Matt isn’t on the physical verge that Foggy has seen before. This is something Foggy hasn’t seen before. Matt’s body may be intact, but something much deeper has cleaved apart. The way an apartment can be clean, the furniture in place, and still be a wasteland.

“Foggy, I can’t,” Matt says. “I can’t catch my breath, I can’t—there’s something _wrong_ with me, Fog—what if this is who I am now: no one, nothing, just this, this paralysis, this lack of myself—it won't be enough, I’ll never be enough now—”

The thing about the right words: they can’t be anticipated. Foggy has spent hours thinking of ways to comfort Matt, to open a door for Matt, to make Matt feel understood, to wake Matt up, to get the old Matt back, the intentions that start good and end up selfish. All this thought has led Foggy again and again to the exact wrong words.

When he says a small, right thing for once, it kicks out of him by instinct.

“You’re enough, Matty, you’ve always been enough.”

He puts a hand over Matt’s, a steadying force. The blood on Matt’s knuckles now shared on Foggy’s palm. Matt’s mouth hovers again, but Foggy knows that something has shifted and quieted within. A parallel feeling lives in Foggy, because he realizes that these are the words he’s been wanting to say to Matt for years. In other moments, they might have felt trite, a hallmark card tossed across a table. In this moment, however, that internal fabric seems stretched between them again, even if it’s only a thread.

Matt’s hand laces into Foggy’s. He’s bracing against Foggy now. They start to stand together. It’s a slow, pained process, a careful process in which Foggy looks out for Matt’s glass-ridden knees and keeps a hand on Matt’s back. It’s a start. And maybe Foggy doesn’t need to know the extent of the darkness that remains collapsed on the floor, all that Matt is leaving behind. As long as he can be part of whatever is beginning. 

***

_“…bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing to reorganize it: with intimacy it recovers its entity…”_

– Gaston Bachelard, _The Poetics of Space_


End file.
